Technology Vision 2020 update – Personalizing the Network Experience

Wireless subscribers today want the network to adapt to their speed in an always connected world, one minute using social media and streaming videos and the next minute connecting sensors, cameras, appliances and cars to the network. How can the network evolve to support each user, application and device dynamically using the network in ways that have not been imagined before?

As part of Technology Vision 2020, Nokia Networks set out to enable mobile networks to deliver gigabytes of data per user per day - profitability and securely - by addressing six major goals: supporting 1000x more capacity, reducing latency to milliseconds, flattening total energy consumption, reinventing telco for the cloud, teaching networks to be self-aware, and bringing it all together for the users within the 'Personalize the Network Experience' pillar.

Personalization and balancing priorities

To provide everyone a great user experience, operators have the unenviable task of balancing scarce network resources, providing the appropriate customer experience to humans and things, while staying profitable and managing investments.

To be able to personalize the network experience, our Nokia Networks FutureWorks researchers realized that the information needed to solve this problem exists within the unique footprint of each user. Together, all the users generate millions of real-time network signaling transactions per second which, with verification, would allow the operators to create the 5th “V” for “value” on top of the 4Vs of Big Data: variety, volume, velocity, and veracity.

With the sources, size and velocity of data identified, the problem to solve was how to extract, transform and make decisions at the speed of the user while still respecting privacy? We had to look outside the wireless industry to access the speed and scale from the IT industry’s Big Data & Analytics with Machine Learning in order to be able to sense, analyze, decide and act with privacy controls.

Nokia Networks has a deep understanding of wireless use cases and the interpretation of network data, but we need technology from another domain to make it usable. The telco industry is a trusted party requiring both security and privacy when handling customer data, and Nokia Networks’ security and privacy expertise is critical to ensure that personalization happens within the rules and regulations of the specific country and according to the allowed privacy window of the user.

Putting Personalization to use in your network

With all the technology and privacy safeguards in place, what are some potential use cases for personalization by the operator?

Four vexing experience problems that can be solved by personalization:

* Detecting a user's application performance and adjusting it dynamically based on the user’s plan level,
* Predicting cell congestion and optimizing capacity along routes,
* Detecting and correcting network anomalies to maintain corporate SLAs, and
* Being ready to detect and mitigate an inevitable bad software update to IoT devices which can negatively affect those accessing the network.

We believe within the Technology Vision 2020 timeframe that operators will be able to realize personalization of the network experience by building on existing customer experience management and combining the best of IT with telco knowledge and use cases.